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While a Harris victory would no doubt ensure smoother negotiations, there’s still Congress to deal with.
Less than a week after election night in the U.S., the United Nations’ annual climate conference begins in Azerbaijan. COP29, as this year’s conference is called, has climate finance and carbon markets on the agenda. It’s no secret that the outcome of the U.S. presidential election could shift the tenor of negotiations significantly on both topics. Everyone knows there’s one candidate who’s better for the climate and one who will be much, much worse.
Even if Harris wins, however, the United States may well continue to shirk its global climate finance obligations. If the U.S. can’t deliver on what it promises at COP29, it may not matter what actually happens there.
Negotiators at COP29 are tasked with setting what’s called the New Collective Quantified Goal on climate finance, a goalpost for the amount of cash governments must put up to meet global climate investment needs. Global South countries excluding China have suggested that they require more than $1 trillion per year in external finance to meet their climate targets. An agreed-upon NCQG will also help all countries flesh out the latest iteration of their national climate plans, also known as Nationally Determined Contributions, as required by the Paris climate agreement.
And yet preliminary discussions over the summer were inconclusive, not just on the NCQG target itself but also on which countries are expected to contribute and what kinds of financing (e.g. public, private, loans, grants) will count toward it. More controversially to some climate activists and civil society groups, negotiators are also using COP29 to finalize a framework for the implementation of Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, which calls for the creation of a global carbon credit market, which countries could use to trade emissions reductions and contribute to each others’ NDCs.
To put it simply: If Donald Trump wins, not much of this will matter. President Biden’s negotiators can still endorse ambitious NCQG and Article 6 targets, but there’s no evidence a second Trump administration will commit to delivering on them. Should Trump win, the U.S. will almost certainly cut itself out of the global climate finance architecture a second time. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 plan, authored largely by Trump associates, not only calls for the U.S. to slash global climate and development funding (as Trump already called for in his first term) but also to withdraw from global negotiating fora entirely. In the breach, Trump administration diplomats will likely stress the importance of gas and non-renewable energy technologies (such as carbon capture) with an emphasis on ensuring domestic energy security and affordability, even as they prepare to gut most if not all of the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
A Kamala Harris victory next week will assuredly be much better for both global emissions reductions and the climate diplomacy landscape. While she has outlined no specific proposals for global climate policy in particular, there is also no evidence that she will renege on any U.S. global commitments made in the past four years or attempt to repeal any climate laws.
As president, she will likely preserve President Biden’s key global climate and development policy initiatives, including the Just Energy Transition Partnerships and the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment. She will also likely support the Biden administration’s push to see the multilateral development banks support more investments in climate and development, particularly through mobilizing the private sector. The current World Bank President, Ajay Banga, was nominated by the United States in early 2023 after serving as co-chair of the Partnership for Central America, a private sector-backed economic development initiative launched by Vice President Harris herself as part of her broader engagement with the region. Their shared history suggests that they will continue collaborating on good terms if Harris is elected.
While none of this is directly connected to COP29 (and putting doubts about the efficacy of these programs aside), it speaks to the Biden-Harris administration’s commitment to, at the very least, platforming global climate and development issues. But will Harris actually deliver on the U.S.’s commitments to the NCQG or otherwise meaningfully increase the amount of public spending devoted to global climate and development goals? Probably not ― although in that case, Congress will be the more likely culprit, not her.
Attempts to appropriate additional funds for global climate programs are cursed with a severe case of legislative inertia. Congress did not significantly slash funding for global climate priorities during the first Trump presidency, but it also did not raise it much during the Biden presidency. Last year’s bipartisan debt limit negotiations didn’t help, of course. But even in the early Biden presidency, when Democrats had their narrow trifecta, Congress massively undershot Biden’s budget requests for global climate-related priorities. In fiscal year 2022, Congress passed less than half of what Biden requested; since then, presidential requests for global climate spending have ballooned in size, while appropriations have stayed flat.
This divergence reflects a stable short-term equilibrium: The Biden administration can showcase the full range of its commitments and bona fides and blame Congress for its failure to deliver on any of them, while Congress can coast on the spending cap deals it made to avoid government shutdowns. But it also ignores the planet-sized elephant in the room — that there’s been no new spending on mitigating climate change. Regardless of who is president, there’s only so much discretionary funding they can ever reallocate toward priority programs absent additional appropriations.
(Here it seems pertinent to remind everyone that the U.S. has never endorsed the global consensus framework of “common but differentiated responsibilities,” which would mean acknowledging a quasi-legal obligation to provide climate finance to Global South countries, on account of the fact that Congress has never been enthusiastic about this. The chances that anyone changes their tone are slim.)
In summary, even if Harris comes out on top on Tuesday, the U.S. will still be stuck in a holding pattern with respect to its global climate priorities. This puts the Biden administration’s COP29 negotiators in a vise: Pushing for a low NCQG gives other countries ground to criticize the U.S.’s inadequate ambition and care for the Global South relative to its ability to contribute, but pushing for an ambitious NCQG also gives other countries greater reason to criticize the U.S. if it fails to deliver. Ambition was never the problem; it has always been the delivery.
Optimistically, a Harris victory at least prevents the U.S. from being a roadblock to other countries’ climate action. But at a time when major Global North donor countries are cutting their aid budgets, American unwillingness to finance solutions to global climate and development challenges makes the rest of the world more dependent on private capital and, in turn, more vulnerable to market downturns, interest rate hikes, and capital outflows. (Alternatively, it makes Global South countries more dependent on petrostate wealth and Chinese imports for macroeconomic stability, although they may be less able to count on large Chinese capital inflows from here on out.) As expert report after expert report has detailed, climate change mitigation or adaptation simply will not happen at scale across the Global South without substantial new external financing.
Still, in lieu of new financing, a Harris administration could stress that efforts to catalyze private investment in the Global South (including through voluntary carbon markets) and reform global taxation also contribute to global decarbonization. And it could continue to argue that the U.S. is doing its part to decarbonize if it manages to pass more landmark climate and green industrialization laws like the Inflation Reduction Act. But it would be false to argue ― as President Biden and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen have done at times, particularly in 2022 ― that the Inflation Reduction Act helps lower the cost of clean tech uptake across the Global South. This is not true — the credit for making clean technology, particularly solar energy, cheaper and more accessible for the Global South goes decisively to China. The U.S. is nowhere close to becoming a major clean technology exporter or a bona fide partner in green industrial transformation for any Global South country, policymakers’ pretensions to the contrary.
One prominent member of Harris’s advisory team, President Biden’s former National Economic Council Director Brian Deese, is trying to change that, advancing ideas like a “Clean Energy Marshall Plan” as an opportunity to deliver on both domestic industrial policy priorities and demands for global leadership vis-a-vis China; his writing exemplifies how American climate diplomacy is being subsumed into national security planning. (Deese is also a Heatmap contributor.) Tactically, this might work in the near-term: The bill to reauthorize the Development Finance Corporation, which would boost the U.S.’s ability to invest in decarbonization-related priorities across the Global South and particularly critical minerals supply chains, cleared the House Foreign Affairs Committee with bipartisan support over the summer. But this is not a strategy that on its own centers the climate and development needs of Global South countries.
So while a Democratic victory next week would certainly be a step toward continued climate action, and while what the Biden administration negotiates at COP29 will at least set a floor for future U.S. commitments (even if that floor is performative), we won’t see a major departure from the status quo unless a Harris administration can convince legislators that American leadership requires a lot more American money.
“We are not going back” ― this much is true. But it would be nice to go forward, too.
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While you were watching Florida and Wisconsin, voters in Naperville, Illinois were showing up to fight coal.
It’s probably fair to say that not that many people paid close attention to last night’s city council election in Naperville, Illinois. A far western suburb of Chicago, the city is known for its good schools, small-town charm, and lovely brick-paved path along the DuPage River. Its residents tend to vote for Democrats. It’s not what you would consider a national bellwether.
Instead, much of the nation’s attention on Tuesday night focused on the outcomes of races in Wisconsin and Florida — considered the first electoral tests of President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s popularity. Outside of the 80,000 or so voters who cast ballots in Naperville, there weren’t likely many outsiders watching the suburb’s returns.
But for clean energy and environmental advocates, the Naperville city council results represent an encouraging, if overlooked, victory. On Tuesday, voters in the suburb elected four candidates — incumbents Benjamin White and Ian Holzhauer, and newcomers Mary Gibson and Ashfaq Syed — all of whom oppose the city signing a new contract with the Prairie State Generating Station, the state’s largest and youngest coal-fired plant and the seventh-dirtiest electricity provider in the country.
Naperville is one of 30 municipal investors in the Prairie State plant whose contract with the Illinois Municipal Electric Agency, a public power agency and one of the nine partial owners of Prairie State, has it locked into coal through 2035. Recently, IMEA approached the municipal investors with the promise of favorable terms on a new contract if the cities and towns were willing to re-sign a decade early — by April 30 — and commit to another 20 years of coal power. Most municipalities took the deal, which will run through 2055; Naperville, along with the towns of St. Charles and Winnetka, are still debating the decision, with the deadline looming.
“IMEA’s proposition for communities is, ‘Hey, instead of paying Wall Street and shareholder dividends, we don’t have any of that because we’re a nonprofit, so you get lower energy costs,’” Fernando Arriola, the community relations chair for Naperville Environment and Sustainability Task Force, which opposes the deal with IMEA, told me. “But the way I look at it is, it’s a deal with the devil because you’re locked in for 30 years. And it’s like Hotel California — you can check in anytime you like, but you can never leave.”
In a statement to Heatmap, Staci Wilson, the vice president of government affairs and member services at IMEA, told me that the contract it offered to Naperville is “designed to help … secure more future green resources to serve our member communities for the long term. IMEA is the only power supplier to allow the city to have a direct voice in procuring their wholesale power supply and make reliable, economical, and sustainable resource decisions for the future.”
While it’s true that IMEA allows its municipal members a voice in its future planning, those in Naperville who oppose the new contract point out that the community has just one vote in the process despite making up 35% of the utility’s market.
The pending contract decision became one of the major themes of the city council race in Naperville — attention that caused some locals to grumble about the injection of partisan politics and outside interest in the campaigns. But Syed, a newly elected city council member and a recent immigrant from Dubai, told me that learning that his city relied on coal for 80% of its energy needs was what ultimately galvanized him into running. “Naperville has been a leader in many things, but in this area, we were not doing good,” he said. “So I stepped up.”
Illinois has one of the nation’s most aggressive decarbonization timelines, requiring coal and gas plants to close by 2030. But there is a carve-out for plants owned by public entities like municipal utilities or rural electric cooperatives, and Prairie State fits that bill. Instead, the power plant has to reduce emissions by 45% by 2038, a goal IMEA says it can reach by installing multi-billion dollar carbon capture and storage technologies. Energy experts have been widely skeptical of the proposal. “The people I’ve talked to say that’s unproven and it doesn’t necessarily work, and it’s a high price,” Arriola said.
Still, cost concerns related to transitioning away from coal had “definitely been a conversation in town” leading up to Tuesday’s election, Arriola told me. “A lot of people are seriously concerned about pricing, and there are also concerns about the reliability.” Syed told me that was one of the objections he heard the most when talking to constituents during his campaign. “Some of the Republicans who were against [exporing alternative energy options] were trying to influence people, saying we need to think about the cost,” he said. “My standard answer to these people was that I am not going to compromise clean energy just for the cost purpose.”
Perhaps most interestingly, unlike many communities that oppose power plants, Naperville is located almost 300 miles north of the Prairie State Generating Station and is unaffected by its immediate pollution. Naperville voters who opposed renewing the contract did so on the merits of finding cleaner energy sources and on the objection to dirty electricity that is otherwise out of sight and out of mind. As Amanda Pankau, the director of energy and community resiliency at the Prairie Rivers Network, an environmental nonprofit in the state, told me, “From a climate perspective, we should all care about the Prairie State coal plant.” She noted that the emissions from the plant — around 12.4 million tons of carbon dioxide a year — are “impacting every single Illinoisan and every single person that lives on planet Earth.”
Despite those existential stakes, it could be tempting to wave away the results in Naperville as being on trend for a relatively affluent and liberal-leaning town. Compared to the Wisconsin supreme court election, where the Democrat-backed candidate overcame enormous spending margins to trounce her Republican-backed opponent, it does not necessarily indicate the same momentum for the party heading into 2026’s midterms. (Nor does it even have the biggest climate-related election headline of the night: Tesla is suing Wisconsin for a law preventing car manufacturers from owning car dealerships, which the state’s high court will likely decide.)
But at a time of little good news in the climate sphere, the Naperville election is an encouraging and invigorating reminder that there are candidates who believe in cleaner technologies, and that the battles can still — or especially — be won at the local level. “Twenty-five or 30 years ago, the IMEA contract we signed for that time was okay,” Syed said. “But it’s not okay today. We cannot have this $2 billion contract until 2055 because the next generation will ask us this question: ‘What have you people done for us this time?’”
The Department of Energy has put together a list of sites and is requesting proposals from developers, Heatmap has learned.
The Department of Energy is moving ahead with plans to allow companies to build AI data centers and new power plants on federal land — and it has put together a list of more than a dozen sites nationwide that could receive the industrial-scale facilities, according to an internal memo obtained by Heatmap News.
The memo lists sites in Texas, Illinois, New Jersey, Colorado, and other locations. The government could even allow new power plants — including nuclear reactors and carbon-capture operations — to be built on the same sites to generate enough electricity to power the data centers, the memo says.
Trump officials hope to start construction on the new data centers by the end of this year and switch them on by the end of 2027, according to the memo.
The agency will request formal feedback from artificial intelligence companies and developers about how best to proceed with its proposal as soon as Thursday, according to an individual who wasn’t authorized to speak about the matter publicly.
The effort, aimed at maintaining America’s “global AI dominance,” represents one of the few points of agreement between the Trump and Biden administrations. In the final days of his term, President Biden ordered the government to identify federal properties where new data centers could be built.
Scarcely a week later, President Trump issued an executive order lifting all Biden-era limits on AI development — but keeping the mandate to move quickly to maintain America’s alleged edge in the new technology. “It is the policy of the United States to sustain and enhance America’s global AI dominance,” the Trump order said.
The new memo proposes a list of 16 federal sites that could host AI data centers, new power plants, and other “AI infrastructure.” They include several sites where nuclear weapon components are made, including the Pantex site near Amarillo, Texas, and the Kansas City National Security Campus, which is operated by Honeywell International. The other candidate sites are:
Other sites could still be considered, the memo says, and the current list has no particular ranking or order.
The offer may not be enough to convince developers to work with the federal government, one energy expert told me.
“I think it’s important that the government is thinking about how to help the industry, but you also have to think about it from the perspective of the industry a little bit. Why is doing this on a DOE site better than doing this as a project in Texas?” said Peter Freed, a founding partner at the Near Horizon Group and the former director of energy strategy at Meta.
“Historically, the perspective is that anything involving government land just adds complexity,” Freed told me. “I love Idaho National Lab. It’s a national treasure. But if you want a data center there by the end of 2027 — where is the power going to come from?”
Only if the government were able to guarantee fast-track access to certain kinds of equipment — such as transformers or circuit breakers, which are in a severe shortage — would it make sense for most developers to work with them, he said.
The new memo raises the idea that “innovative energy technologies” including “nuclear reactors, enhanced geothermal systems, fuel cells, carbon capture, energy storage systems, and portfolios of on-site technologies” could be considered to power the new data centers.
The memo asks potential developers, “What information would you need to determine the suitability of various energy storage systems (e.g., subsurface thermal energy storage, flow battery, metal anode battery) as a means for supporting data center cooling or other operations?” It also asks what companies would need to know about a site’s suitability for carbon capture and storage operations. It asks, too, what information might be needed about a site’s topography, physical security, and earthquake risk to build a new nuclear power plant.
The memo doesn’t mention wind turbines or new solar farms, although they could fall under some of the terms it sets out. It also asks companies what information they might need about nearby nuclear power plants or the local power grid — and it inquires whether some data center operations could be turned on and off depending on local power availability.
Although the government could allow new data centers to be built, it won’t accept all liability for them. The memo adds that companies might need to “agree to bear all responsibility for costs and liabilities related to construction and operation of the Al data centers as well as other infrastructure upgrades necessary to support those data centers.”
The Trump administration seems intent on moving quickly on the proposal. Once it publishes the request, companies will have 30 days to respond.
Current conditions: A rare wildfire alert has been issued for London this week due to strong winds and unseasonably high temperatures • Schools are closed on the Greek islands of Mykonos and Paros after a storm caused intense flooding • Nearly 50 million people in the central U.S. are at risk of tornadoes, hail, and historic levels of rain today as a severe weather system barrels across the country.
President Trump today will outline sweeping new tariffs on foreign imports during a “Liberation Day” speech in the White House Rose Garden scheduled for 4 p.m. EST. Details on the levies remain scarce. Trump has floated the idea that they will be “reciprocal” against countries that impose fees on U.S. goods, though the predominant rumor is that he could impose an across-the-board 20% tariff. The tariffs will be in addition to those already announced on Chinese goods, steel and aluminum, energy imports from Canada, and a 25% fee on imported vehicles, the latter of which comes into effect Thursday. “The tariffs are expected to disrupt the global trade in clean technologies, from electric cars to the materials used to build wind turbines,” explained Josh Gabbatiss at Carbon Brief. “And as clean technology becomes more expensive to manufacture in the U.S., other nations – particularly China – are likely to step up to fill in any gaps.” The trade turbulence will also disrupt the U.S. natural gas market, with domestic supply expected to tighten, and utility prices to rise. This could “accelerate the uptake of coal instead of gas, and result in a swell in U.S. power emissions that could accelerate climate change,” Reutersreported.
Republican candidates won in two House races in Florida on Tuesday, one of which was looking surprisingly tight going into the special elections. The victories by Jimmy Patronis in Florida’s First District and Randy Fine in the Sixth District bolster the party’s slim House majority and could spell trouble for the Inflation Reduction Act as the House Ways and Means Committee mulls which programs to cut to pay for tax cuts. But the result in Wisconsin’s Supreme Court election was less rosy for Republicans. Liberal Judge Susan Crawford defeated conservative Brad Schimel despite Schimel’s huge financial backing from Tesla CEO and Trump adviser Elon Musk, who poured some $15 million into the competition. The outcome “could tarnish the billionaire’s political clout and trigger worry for some Republicans about how voters are processing the opening months of Trump’s new administration,” as The Wall Street Journalexplained.
The Trump administration announced mass layoffs across the Department of Health and Human Services on Wednesday, part of a larger effort to reduce the agency’s workforce by 25%. The cuts included key staffers with the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which has existed since 1981 and helps some 6.7 million low-income households pay their energy bills. A 2022 white paper calls LIHEAP “one of the most critical components of the social safety net.” The move comes at a time when many U.S. utilities are preparing to raise their energy prices to account for higher costs for materials, labor, and grid upgrades. In a scathing letter to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy. Jr., Senate Energy and Commerce Democrats call the workforce cuts “reckless” and demand detailed explanations for why roles have been eliminated.
Energy storage startup Energy Vault on Wednesday announced it had closed $28 million in project financing for a hybrid green hydrogen microgrid energy storage facility in California. The firm says its Calistoga Resiliency Center, deployed in partnership with utility company Pacific Gas & Electric, is “specifically designed to address power resiliency given the growing challenges of wildfire risk in California.” The zero-emission system will feature advanced hydrogen fuel cells that are integrated with lithium-ion batteries, which can provide about 48 hours of back-up power via a microgrid to the city of Calistoga during wildfire-related power shutoffs. The site is expected to be commercially operational in the second quarter of 2025.
“The CRC serves as a model for Energy Vault’s future utility-scale hybrid microgrid storage system deployments as the only existing zero-emission solution to address [power shutoff] events that is scalable and ready to be deployed across California and other regions prone to wildfires,” the company said in a press release. As Heatmap’s Katie Brigham wrote last fall, PG&E has become an important partner for climate and energy tech companies with the potential to reduce risk and improve service on the grid.
China will finalize its first-ever sale of a green sovereign bond Wednesday. The country is expected to issue the bond on the London Stock Exchange and has reportedly received more than $5 billion in bids. “It’s no coincidence that China has chosen to list its debut green bond in London, given European investors’ continued strong demand for environmental products,” Bloombergnoted. Green bonds are investment vehicles that raise money exclusively for projects that benefit the climate or environment. China’s finance ministry wants the bond to “attract international funds to support domestic green and low-carbon development,” and specifically climate change mitigation and adaptation, nature conservation and biodiversity, and pollution prevention and control. Some of the money raised might also go toward China’s EV charging infrastructure, according toReuters.
GE Vernova has now produced more than half of the turbines needed for the SunZia Wind project in New Mexico. When completed in 2026, the 2.4 gigawatt project will be the largest onshore wind farm in the Western Hemisphere.